290 THE ARIAN INVITED TO ORTHODOX FAITH. as where it is said, " Moses shall go forth from the desart, and the king Messiah from Rome, and the " memra" of God shall be leader between them both, &c." But then he gives this rea- son for it, that " memra" denotes Christ with relation to his divine subsistence, and before his assumption of human nature, and the Messiah denotes him only as he was to appear visibly and become man, and therefore these authors generally distin- guish the one from the other, page 143. And it is no wonder, since they had not a clear and distinct knowledge of the com- plete person of the Messiah, nor is it evident, that they believed that he should be the true and eternal God. Objection. But is it hot a vain attempt, to pretend to prove the doctrine of the Trinity from the Jewish rabbies, when it is evident in itself, and generally granted by learned men, that the ancient Jews had no distinct notion of this doctrine, nor did they generally believe the deity of their Messiah, according to your own confession ? Answer. I am not proving the sacred doctrine of the Trinity from "any of their writings. My present chief business is only to spew, that by various intimations and notices which they derived from the Old Testament, they are frequently led to speak of theword of God, or " memra," as a power of the di- vine nature ; that-they also make " memra to signify a glorious archangel ; and though the Jews themselves do not expressly join these two, to make one complex person, yet they attribute so many of the same things to both, that gives a great deal of countenance to the doctrine of the New Testament, which seems to havejoined or united these two "memras" in the one person of the Messiah, that is, our blessed Saviour. But of this more hereafter. -I grant all the later Jews have an aversion to the doctrine of theTrinity, and the deity of Christ, anddeny Jesus ofNazareth to be the Messiah : And therefore they apply a multitude of scrip- tures to David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Isaiah, &c. which their ancient rabbies applied to the Messiah, for fear lest they should agree to Jesus. But.Dr. Owen, in his learned Exerc tations on the Epistle to the Hebrews, especially 8, 9, 10, 11. spews, that the targums abound in applying the scriptureprophecies to the Messiah. Before I make any more inferences, let us consult the writ- ingsof Philo the Jew ; he lived in Alexandria in Egypt, and was one of the ambassadors ofthe Jews to the emperor of Rome,: a little after the death of our Saviour. He was a great writer, and a very learned man : His language is Greek, and he is sup-, posed to write in our Saviour's life-time. In many of his books he speaks of the " logos," or the word of God, and used it in most of those senses in which the targums use it.
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